It is a well accepted physiological phenomena that the mental attitude of a person subjected to pain stimulus will dictate the level of pain which is registered on the individual's consciousness. Fear and anxiety are also known to heighten the sensation of pain which a person will experience when subjected to a given stimulus. It is also well accepted that audio and visual stimuli can mask pain stimulus to levels that are usually acceptable to the individual in the absence of anesthesia.
It is further accepted that familiarity with a subject will lessen anxiety and thereby reduce the conscious level of pain experienced by a person subjected to a given stimulus.
Practioners in the field of dentistry are particularly sensitive to the real and imagined pain which their patients experience, and they are constantly attempting to allay their patient's fears and anxieties. One of the ways that they attempt to relax their patients is to explain and illustrate the procedure that they are about to perform.
Dentists realizing that a relaxed and distracted patient has a higher tolerance for pain, have for years used music to help mask the pain stimulus inherent in dental procedures, and only recently have they begun to employ visual stimuli to distract and relax their patients prior to and possibly during the actual dental procedure (Dental Survey, October 1978, page 11, col. 2).
To date, there has not been devised a system which will accomplish the functions of education, distraction and entertainment with the resultant lessening of anxiety, relaxation, and increased tolerance to pain, which will also function in combination with a dental light to allow the dentist to direct the light into the patient's mouth, while at the same time adjusting the visual stimuli so that they patient does not have to crane his neck to maintain visual contact.